Posted on 10/27/2005 9:08:04 AM PDT by SmithL
"Oakland Raider Parking Lot'' will be shown tomorrow night at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival. The documentary, by independent filmmaker Jason Blalock, introduces viewers to the infamous, loud and often boozy members of the Raider Nation. Blalock, now in graduate school at Cal, says he is no sports fan and so his friends warned him what he was getting into.
"Everybody I mentioned it to went, 'Oooooh, I don't want to go there. Not to the Black Hole,' '' Blalock says.
The film couldn't be more timely because the Raiders, as well as Oakland and Alameda County, are at a crossroads, in no small part because of the reputation of its fans.
When the team returned from Los Angeles 10 years ago, fans were sold personal seat licenses -- in effect, contracts sold to generate some of the cash needed to bring the team back to Oakland and renovate the Coliseum without a tax hike. Critics called the unpopular PSLs a ticket to buy a ticket -- the idea was to get fans to not only pay for a season ticket, but the privilege to buy it. It didn't work. Not enough fans bought the PSLs.
The 10-year PSL plan expires this year, and if fans don't sign up again -- or if another, more popular plan isn't introduced to replace it -- the losses to Oakland, which bankrolled the return, could reach tens of millions of dollars.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I bought PSL's the first two seasons and then threw them in the trash. I'll get drunk with the best of em in the lot and in the stadium and it's fine if you're with the guys (not fine but OK). I took my wife to a game and that was it. I don't want season tickets if I can't take my wife and kids occasionally. I take my 7 year old daughter to the A's games all the time in the same park and it's great. It's the fans and the tolerance for those fans and it's ridiculous. I know alot of folks who still go but they go for the high end seats for the most part. I never thought of the hole as nearly expensive enough to qualify as high end.
I dont know about the Priuses...those Raider games were nuts, with lots of violence in the parking lots. I had some friends down from Seattle and we went to a Raider game, and a riot broke out in the end zone. They were ready to leave when the tear gas was deployed.
Exactly!
Can you believe they are blaming their fans for their financial woes?
How about fielding a decent team!
PS... the Lunatics/Rowdy Fans are a small fraction of the game attendees. The $$$ of the PSLs is what people don't like. Actually, the THEORY of PSLs is what I don't like!
I gave up my seats to the SF Giants because of this PSL crap. Happy to go for just a few games per year - or just watch at my favorite watering hole.
LOOTIE NATION
Al Davis is sinking the Raiders. If you add an extension to your stadium and can't field a product that will fill the seats, plus making people pay PSLs on top of that, you're left with a sinking franchise.
During their last SB run somebody from ESPN2 did a game with the Black Hole denizens, found out most of them were lawyers and stockbrokers, after the game most of them got in Mercedes. They were just regular guys with a flare for the rowdy and wierd at games.
There's nothing ridiculous about it, the Raiders have always been about misfits. I'm sure there are some sections that are filled with more mellow people that would be fine for a 7 year old. Rowdies cluster, as do mellows. We get the same thing at college hockey games here, the sections near the visiting bench and visiting penalty boxes are filled with the loud and obnoxious (including me), the area behind the goal has the more mellow crowd. When I bring friends with kids I get seats away from the rowdies because that's the right thing.
Endzone up front is generally considered to be the second best spot for football (right after 50 yard line up front).
LOL..how did the Looter guy get tickets?
When owner Al Davis wasted his first-round draft pick a few years back on a kicker with a criminal past (Sebastian Janakowski) I knew he had lost whatever sanity and good judgment he has once possessed. (Janakowski turned out average, at best). No way Davis would've made such a move in his prime.
Long gone are the days when Davis could proudly (and accurately) state that the Raiders have the highest winning percentage of any franchise in the history of professional sports.
Actually taking a kicker for his first round pick was the right move. The season before the team had gone 8-8 and lost 4 of those games by less than 3 points and had missed field goals in all 4, also their opponents had the best average starting field position in the league thanks to a horde of short kickoffs. The team would have gone to the playoffs with a better kicking game. While the kicker picked turned out to be not so good picking a kicker was the right move.
Maybe so, but he's a rank amateur at killing a football team compared to the Yorks.
I'm not saying they didn't need a kicker, just that it was completely unnecessary (and detrimental) to waste a first-round pick on one. Plenty of decent kickers can be found in the lower rounds. .....and every last one of them were/are more stable mentally than ole Sebastian.
Your first round pick is generally used to either fix a glaring problem in your team or get somebody to train up to replace an aging player in a year or two. The rest of the team was solid and still pretty young, but their kicking sucked. I don't disagree that Sebastian was the wrong pick, but I think given the state of the team at that point a kicker is what they needed most and that's what you should use the first round for.
Nice, but I am a lifelong Denver Broncos fan...
It's sad to see a great franchise mucking around at the bottom of the league, even if you aren't a Niner's fan.
When your kicking game takes you out of the playoffs it needs to be solved, nothing wrong with using your first draft pick to solve the problem.
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